There is a horrible fix at http://codereview.chromium.org/293019 that effectively sends
a keypressed() in addition to the keydown(), but maybe this is a docs bug (it does work
with the current events on linux after all). I need to talk to the docs guys and read up on
how keyboard stuff is supposed to work.
CC'd people, maybe this is interesting to you.

Key events fell through all the standardization process for a very long time. Key
events are back on track but the current proposal, http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-
Events/#event-type-keypress , deprecates keypress events instead of dealing with the
browser incompatibility mess.
Here is a mail sent to webkit-dev when Apple changed the key events in Safari to match
IE better: http://www.mail-archive.com/webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org/msg01555.html.
Note that what PPK says makes sense in a perfect world and it is the only sane behavior
but almost nothing is sane when it comes to key events and WebKit is trying to follow
IE in spirit but have a few Gecko-ism for compatibility.

One thing that is not trivial to do is making the keypress() events cancellable. RIght now
we trigger accelerators on the keydown()'s ACK message – and doing it on the
keypress() ACK doesn't work on OS X, because Cocoa can't fire menu items based on
the synthetic events we create for keypress()s.
One way that might work would be to keep a map from keydown() to keypress() events
in the browser process and send the keydown() event back to cocoa once the keypress()
ACK arrives. I suspect this will be annoying on windows and linux as well.

To clarify:
"all keyboard events" means all keys that would have generated keypress without
ctrl/meta. So, ctrl+a should fire a keypress event, meta+a should fire a keypress event
but ctrl+up arrow should not.

thakis,
(in reply to comment 12)
> Yes, Safari makes nearly all shortcuts cancelable (there are some that are not cancelable, e.g. cmd-1, but nearly all of them are)
It seems there are some issues about our key-event handling code and preventDefault(), e.g. Issue 15311 , Issue 23824, etc.
Regards,